A defense of content-internalism and semantic externalism

What is it to have a concept? What is it to make an inference? What is it to be rational? On the basis of recent developments in semantics, a number of authors have embraced answers to these questions that have radically counterintuitive consequences, for example:

One can rationally accept self-contradictory propositions (e.g. Smith is a composer and Smith is not a composer).

Psychological states are causally inert: beliefs and desires do nothing.

One can have a single concept without having any others: an otherwise conceptless creature could grasp the concept of justice or of the number seven.

Thoughts are sentence-tokens, and thought-processes are driven by the syntactic, not the semantic, properties of those tokens.

In the first half of Conceptual Atomism and the Computational Theory of Mind, John-Michael Kuczynski argues that these implausible but widely held views are direct consequences of a popular doctrine known as content-externalism, this being the view that the contents of one’s mental states are constitutively dependent on facts about the external world. Kuczynski shows that content-externalism involves a failure to distinguish between, on the one hand, what is literally meant by linguistic expressions and, on the other hand, the information that one must work through to compute the literal meanings of such expressions.

The second half of the present work concerns the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Underlying CTM is an acceptance of conceptual atomism – the view that a creature can have a single concept without having any others – and also an acceptance of the view that concepts are not descriptive (i.e. that one can have a concept of a thing without knowing of any description that is satisfied by that thing). Kuczynski shows that both views are false, one reason being that they presuppose the truth of content-externalism, another being that they are incompatible with the epistemological anti-foundationalism proven correct by Wilfred Sellars and Laurence Bonjour. Kuczynski also shows that CTM involves a misunderstanding of terms such as “computation”, “syntax”, “algorithm” and “formal truth”; and he provides novel analyses of the concepts expressed by these terms. (Series A)

Cognitive maps and causal connections: Why the causal story is an important part of the descriptive story

109–121

Concepts as knowledge of series of interlocking existence-claims

123–127

The problem of de re senses

129–151

Publicity problems and the nature of linguistic communication

153–162

Content-externalism and self-knowledge

163–179

Why one’s mental content is fixed by one’s epistemic situation

181–187

Jackson and Pettit on program-causality and content-externalism

189–213

Fodor, Conceptual Atomism, and Computationalism

215

Content-externalism and atomism

217–259

The concept of a symbol

261–284

Event-causation and the root-problem with CTM

285–292

Fodor’s first argument for conceptual atomism

293–313

Fodor’s second argument for conceptual atomism

315–326

Fodor’s third argument for conceptual atomism

327–396

Some arguments for the Symbolic Conception of Thought

397–407

A positive argument against SCT

409–418

Another argument against LOT: The concept of non-conceptual content

419–428

Propositional structure and the ineliminability of non-conceptual content

429–442

Conceptual content and the structure of the proposition

443–465

Peacocke on concept-possession

467–481

Semantics versus psychology

483–506

Conclusion

507–508

Bibliography

509–516

Index

517–524

“[...] In all, Kuczynski has constructed a powerful and plausible refutation of several of the ruling precepts in cognitive science, offering a sophisticated and informed alternative perspective.”

Daniel N. Robinson, Oxford University, in Metaphysics, Sept. 2008

Cited by

Cited by other publications

Hamilton Fairley, Neil

2020.
De Se
Attitudes and Computation
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Theoria

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